Ms. Hen reviews The Testaments

 

The Testaments

Margaret Atwood

Anchor Books    

2019

Ms. Hen decided to read this because she realized she had never read it when it came out. One of her coworkers asked her if she had read it, and she couldn't remember, so she poured over her blog for the last year and a half to see if she had written a review. She remembers wanting to read it, but the troubles of the world made the book slip off her radar. But she finally bought it, and was not disappointed.

This novel is the sequel to THE HANDMAID'S TALE, which Ms. Hen reviewed in 2017. You can read that here:

http://mshenreviewsthings.blogspot.com/2017/02/ms-hen-reviews-

handmaids-tale.html

This novel does not follow the TV series, which Ms. Hen has not seen. THE TESTAMENTS is about three different women dealing with life in Gilead, Aunt Lydia, Agnes, and Daisy, who later goes back to her original name, Nicole. Nicole lives in Canada, but her parents are involved in working to save Gilead, Agnes is a young woman in Gilead who decides not to get married, and takes the path to become an aunt, and Aunt Lydia is the most powerful aunt, and the story goes into her history as well as her present. 

In Gilead, women are not allowed to learn to read and their only purpose is to marry and have children. Aunts take care of teaching the young women, as well as being powerful members of the community; they do not marry. The purpose of Handmaids is to bear children for the men, and the Wives get married and take care of their households. Marthas are women who are servants. If a man has a lot of money, he has more Marthas.

Aunt Lydia wants to bring down Gilead, because she has suffered too long. At first Ms. Hen couldn't figure out if this novel took place before or after THE HANDMAID'S TALE, but toward the end, she figured out it takes place afterwards.

When Ms. Hen first started reading this, she was not sure who was speaking at first. The changing first person POVs from the different characters confused her. After a while, she got into the book, and she knew who was speaking when they were speaking. For her, that was the most difficult part of the book.

Other than the POVs, she loved this book. It's exactly what she likes to read. This is an important novel about how the world could turn out to be, if we are not careful. Hopefully, we will never go down this path as a society.

Ms. Hen found a few chickens and hens, and the characters are always eating eggs, which Ms. Hen found symbolic. Aunt Lydia muses on the aunts taking care of themselves, "If you are familiar with school playgrounds of the rougher sort, or with henyards, or indeed with any situation in which the rewards are small but the competition is fierce you will understand the forces at work." She thinks later, "If it's a henyard, I thought, I intend to be the alpha hen." She wanted to be in charge and she was. Ms. Hen admires her.

Ms. Hen recommends this book to anyone who wants to get angry, and also to anyone who desires to know what the world could be like if we let evil men take control. She recommends reading THE HANDMAID'S TALE first, in order to understand the plight of the handmaids. Books like this show us how we shouldn't become, which Ms. Hen thinks is important.